11 July 2012

The latest from the director of Buried wants to be an amazing, far-out horror-mystery like Angel Heart—right down to its small-but-crucial part for Robert DeNiro—but it's campy bananas instead. Cillian Murphy and Sigourney Weaver star as paranormal investigators who expose frauds and debunk tech-savvy charlatans when not teaching their college class in Magic's Biggest Secrets Revealed. But strange events suggest that maybe these skeptics are wrong! Could the answers lie with America's most famous, possibly legit psychic (DeNiro), who happens to be coming out of reclusion after several decades?

Red Lights is super-serious and strange: it nearly climaxes with a newsreel-like detailing of laboratory experiments; it takes place in an alternate universe in which faith healers and their critics generate front-page, top-of-the-fold headlines...

06 July 2012

The first scene boasts one of the best-conceived scares I've seen in years: a woman, home alone, wanders her house, holding a laptop, trying to get an Internet connection so she can video-chat with her young daughter. Finally, she gets a clear signal. "Mommy," the kid asks, "who's that behind you?" And the connection cuts out. It's a lot like the classic look-into-the-mirror-and-see-somebody's-behind-you scare, updated to exploit recent technological advancements. It ought to be lifted by every other horror movie this year until it becomes an insufferable cliché.

Writer-director McCarthy shows quite the command of horror-form in this haunted house-serial killer genre mash-up, his feature debut, particularly a facility with Shining-esque tracking shots down hallways. (He also makes the effort to put a clever spin on clichés; a Ouija board scene works much better when the board is scrawled on the floor of a closet.) The whole movie's creepy as fuck. When the first real jolt arrived 20 minutes in, I literally got goosebumps—and I couldn't even tell what I was looking at. It's that well-crafted.

20 June 2012

Whether it was deliberate, it makes sense that Woody Allen would follow his greatest commercial success since 1986's Hannah and Her Sisters with something similar. Like the $56 million-grossing Midnight in Paris, his latest, To Rome with Love, is a romantic portrait of a great old European capital that acknowledges both its yesterdays and today. Rome isn't about nostalgia like Paris, but the city's past is present in every frame, conspicuous on every street and in every facade, serving as the backdrop for the uniquely modern misadventures of a diverse group of contemporary Romans: natives and transplants, both Italian and international.

13 June 2012

There are two major arguments against the death penalty: that it's inherently wrong for the state to kill its own people, and that it's possible to kill an innocent man. The former is philosophical; the latter, scientific, a matter of evidence. As such, I think the latter makes for duller, more superficial art. Others disagree. Take The Tortured, a thinking man's movie for dummies, which isn't about the death penalty but vigilantism and torture, though its makers are faced with a similar choice: to attack the issue from a purely moral perspective, or to look at possible if unlikely problems in practice. Guess which way it goes?

06 June 2012

America loves a winner, but Todd Solondz loves a loser. His films—from Welcome to the Dollhouse to Life During Wartime—have been dedicated to the country's creeps and weirdoes, perhaps none more so than his latest, which even takes its name from that most idealized hero—the long shot, the nobody. The essential question here is to whom the title really refers. I don't think it's the protagonist.

That's Abe (Jordan Gelber), a sum of super-loser signifiers: he's overweight and balding; he collects action figures, holds a shitty office job, and lives with his parents (Mia Farrow and Christopher Walken, who're often seen watching Seinfeld reruns, a funhouse reflection of their subdued suburban dysfunction). Saddest of all, he listens to nothing but optimistic contemporary bubblegum pop. At a wedding, Abe meets not-cute a morose woman, Miranda (Selma Blair), whom he asks posthaste to marry him. "I want to want you," she tells him tearfully; "That's good enough for me," he replies.

29 May 2012

The most serious threats are invisible in the nuclear nightmare Chernobyl Diaries. Sure, there's a bear, wild dogs, and eerie architecture, but the most dangerous hide either in shadows or in plain sight, given away by a glimpse from the camera or a bleeping Geiger counter—they're radiation and its mutated victims. First-time director Bradley Parker—who cut his teeth doing visual effects for Matt Reeves, James Gray and others—exploits silence and darkness more than their opposites, keeping his monsters hidden from view, instead warming you to his charismatic actors before threatening them with simple thuds and other vaguely menacing sounds. He's an expert tension creator: his camera sticks too close to characters when you wish it would pull back (like Ti West's did in The Innkeepers), and hangs back too far when it ought to be closer; you feel like you're watching, but also like you're being watched.

25 May 2012

Fresh off a weeklong engagement at BAM, The Color Wheel opened for a week at Cinema Village. "This is very exciting," director Alex Ross Perry wrote on his Facebook wall. "I saw The Brown Bunny for the second time at Cinema Village." At a Q&A with The New Yorker's Richard Brody on Wednesday, the second-to-last day of the BAM run, Perry talked about Vincent Gallo, Philip Roth, incest, and the differences between his character and his real self. (Mostly, it has to do with a belt.)

Alex Ross Perry loves BAM, so much so that he wore the free BAM socks he was recently given to a Q&A at the Rose Cinemas after a screening of his breakthrough feature, The Color Wheel, making him the first director, he hoped, to wear BAM socks at a BAM Q&A. Like his film, Perry can be silly, but also serious, cutting, and droll. His influences are varied, but Philip Roth is probably the biggest on the film's story and tone, he said—"humor plus the existential sense of sexual dread"; it's no accident that the credits use the typeface from the first edition of Portnoy's Complaint. (Perry said he spoke to the font's original designer, who was excited about their using it, and who "gave us advice, which we didn't use, on how to make the T better.")

17 May 2012

Hammer Films announces that it's back in business with The Woman in Black, which employs some of the renowned horror studio's flagship cliches: misty marshes, Victorian/Edwardian mores, and gloomy Brits. As directed by James Watkins, whose previous feature Eden Lake was efficient but bland, it's a masterpiece of atmosphere, its horror grounded in the well-defined psychological reality of its protagonist. (The script is by Jane Goldman, who also had a hand in last summer's emotionally rich X-Men: First Class.) Daniel Radcliffe, fresh off Harry Potter and commanding the film with his anguished and expressive gaze, plays Arthur Kipps, a London lawyer sent north to close an estate; it's located in a unwelcoming town, the estate itself amid a bleak landscape wherein a Baskerville hound might prowl. Outdoor white-out fogs compete with the shadowy interiors, dark corners and corridors of the dead woman's mansion—dusty, decrepit, and dark even by daylight—where things have a tendency to go bump and pitter-patter.

The house and hamlet are haunted literally by the title character; but the cursed country town where it's located is also haunted figuratively by the many deaths of its children—Arthur fits right in! The Woman in Black is a film awash in dead kids; for Arthur, they are an understandable manifestation of his torment: his own son, after all, was responsible for killing in childbirth his beloved wife, for whom he still mourns years later, his eyes heavy with bereavement. (We see her—in drawings, flashbacks, and fantasies—dressed in an angelic white, the negative-image of the title's murderous ghost.) Kipps's mere presence in the town costs the lives of many children, the symbolic result of his implicit resentment of his own son. The crumbling estate becomes a physical representation of Kipps's and the town's griefs—as black and pernicious as the deepest recesses of their respective souls. The pleasures of Watkins's film are the astoundingly bleak setting and its moon- and candle-lighted creepery; but what makes it satisfying are the coherent psychological underpinnings. Grade: B

Directed by: William Brent Bell
Written by: William Brent Bell and Matthew PetermanFull credits at IMDb

The central tension in exorcism movies is that between religion and psychology: is she—it's always a she—possessed, or just crazy? But that's not really an issue in The Devil Inside. "How do you know when [a case of possession] is real?" one character asks an exorcist. "You know," he answers. Bam! The question here isn't whether possession is real—it's what the church is doing to fight it. Or, isn't doing! That's right, the latest exorcism movie, about a documentary film crew following a team of unorthodox spirit-expellers, is an attack on bureaucracy—but also against the cultural forces that corrupt the purity the church protects.

The movie's exorcists, operating outside the diocese, are coded as mavericks, enemies of rules and regulations who even smoke cigarettes and drink wine. But, you know, some rules—God's rules—ain't for breaking. The movie slants conservative: it's anti-education (as when one priest says "you'll learn more in five minutes of an exorcism than you will in three months of some class"), and it's anti-abortion, as one character is made to feel shame about one in her past, even though a doctor recommended it (what does science know that God doesn't?); those possessed use foul language and bleed from their vaginas, linking possession with sexual maturation. Such cultural evils are so strong they can even corrupt priests—i.e., the church.

Of course, were priests to swear, it might not be so bad; some of God's rules only apply to women. As for the guys, one of the male characters' sin is his camera: his probing, his voyeurism. He's detested by all the other characters for his dimwittedness and arrogance. (When a female character has a harrowing emotional experience, he dickishly remarks from behind a viewfinder, "great! Great stuff!") One by one, the movie's evil demon will possess, attack, shame, or kill these men and women, filmmakers and priests; its function is to call out their sins, and punish them with death. Sounds a bit like the Catholic church. Grade: C

Silent House has a silly payoff, but for most of its 85-minute run time, it's as tense as piano wire. Presented deceptively as a single take, it's actually a series of takes edited "invisibly," with the cuts craftily hidden, a la Rope. But whether it's genuine or not has little bearing on its effect: the confining seeming lack of edits is, duh, thrilling. Set almost entirely in a boarded up house—and often lit by the actors—it gets its scares the old-fashioned way, with creaks, bumps, and creeping around in the dark. You feel like a character in the film, slowly poking through this empty house, gripped with anxiety.

But really it's Elizabeth Olsen who's doing the poking; trapped in this house with what we believe to be a psychokiller—the film plays on a familiar structure of nightmares, the inability to escape; even when Olsen escapes the house, she's brought right back—she's terrorized almost exclusively by sounds, shadows and blurs—by the elements of cinema itself. The camera swings so fast you can't ever really see what makes Olsen jump; it's the jumping itself that's so unnerving. Silent House makes you afraid of fear, makes you react to reactions.

Olsen is a great anchor, commanding what's essentially an 85-minute close-up. She's best when she's hiding out, trembling under a table, shrieking without making a sound. With such mastery of form and performance, it's unfortunate that the movie gives in to some late-act twists, adding a psychological complexity the movie doesn't need. (The lake house has a mold infection—it's a metaphor for the unseen, underlying rot in the foundations of her family!) Without such High Tension-esque inanity, the movie is a terrific formal exercise, a terrifying dissolution into subjective nightmare. Grade: B

Steven Soderbergh's fleet, pulpy, gripping, and fun Haywire is artful action par excellence—and a lefty parable about the unreliability of private contractors. It opens, like Martha Marcy May Marlene, in upstate New York: a young woman (Gina Carano) is in a diner, on the run, when one of the men out to find her appears. But she's no broken Marcy May type—she's more of an empowered Lisbeth Salander, kicking the asses of the men who would do violence to her. Her retribution is so violent, in fact, that people in the theater with me gasped and, out loud, asked her to stop. She kills one foe by wrapping her legs around his throat and pulling his face into her crotch. (Despite this feminine kind of violence, she's coded male, spending her free time oiling guns. "I don't wear the dress," she says.)

You can keep your indie Soderbergh: the prolific ad absurdum director—Contagion came out what felt like days before this movie—is at his best when he's in full Hollywood mode, here crafting a semi-homage to the 70s' international-espionage films, replete with slick montages. (He's also the poet of hotel and conference rooms, making sickly modern lighting look as rich as paint.) It's old-fashioned yet dynamic: the fight scenes and stunts are wonderfully naturalistic, rough-and-tumble martial acts that resemble dances in their physicality (Carano is a retired MMA star); the foot chases through alleys and across roof tops are tense, the black-and-white slo-mo climaxes, beautiful. And though the thin script—by Lem Dobbs, Soderbergh's collaborator on Kafka and The Limey—offers little in the way of characters, back story, or motivation, there is a fun little moral. Carano works for a spy firm privately contracted by the federal government, but her employer is into some shady shit. Many double crosses and much perfidy later, the failure of the private sector, the face of sinister capitalism, is plain. "The motive is money," the bad guy admits. "The motive is always money." Grade: B+

Pina's title refers not just to the late choreographer Pina Bausch but also to the institution she founded and the ideal she embodied—that dance is life. Wender's 3D documentary tears the dances off the stage and drops them into the real world, letting Pina's troupe fill the spaces between the major set pieces (like her rivetingly violent "Rite of Spring," all writhing, thrashing, and toppling over) with choreography in train stations, trams, street corners, forests, and streams. Every dancer is introduced with a short individual dance that defines their personality. Wenders also lets them talk, but we never see them speaking; the movie pushes a philosophy that words are necessary but not sufficient. Like music or the image, dance transcends language, expressing the ineffable—compensating when words fail.

Shooting in 3D, Wenders restores some of the theatricality that would otherwise be lost in the transfer between media. He's also no mere passive recorder: he uses camera movement, cuts and mise-en-scene to transform Pina's choreography into cinema, introducing new dimensions of movement beyond those of the dancers' bodies. He captures the best of both film and dance. (Pina's people prove excellent film actors, as well, their evocative facial expressions served well by close-ups.) As in The Buena Vista Social Club, Wenders is reluctant to let performances play out in full; he abridges the dances, interrupting them with archival interviews and rehearsal footage. But this is because the dance is not Pina's, or even Pina's, sole subject: it's also the dancers, the philosophy, the feeling. Grade: A-

27 April 2012

Is modern India as repressive as Victorian England? That's what Michael Winterbottom suggests in his latest, Trishna; how else could he locate Tess of the d'Urbervilles there and make the fit between story and setting seem so natural? Freida Pinto stars as the title character, and she's great, starting off as a bashful and kind country girl who slowly opens herself up to the possibilities of the big city, only to be shut down again by circumstance—the double standards and rigid moral codes of the countryside. Winterbottom shows the timelessness of Hardy's melodramatic plots about social strictures and sexual exploitation, depicting an India of polarized classes—one inhabiting a fantasy world of luxury, the other a hardscrabble reality—where fusty traditions butt heads with modernity's looser values. The movie breathes life into Hardy's timeless themes with fresh settings.

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine

The only thing moodier than a teenager is a dying teenager. "Life is a sexually transmitted disease," says Donald (Thomas Sangster), the cancer-stricken, attitudinizing 15-year-old hero of Death of a Superhero who broods, misbehaves, and expresses himself through the Sin City-like characters that fill his sketchbooks (and which he occasionally graffitis); director Ian Fitzgibbon intersperses animations throughout the film featuring the characters Donald creates: a troubled superhero (a version of himself), a twisted villain (his disease), and a voluptuous femme (who embodies his pubescent fantasies).

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine

Werner Herzog is against the death penalty. He begins every episode of his Death Row Portraits, a four-part miniseries made for Investigation Discovery, by admitting as much; as a German, how could you not be? But his approach is morally demanding. Unlike, say, David Grann's "Trial By Fire," in which the New Yorker reporter uncovers evidence that suggests the state of Texas executed an innocent man, Herzog doesn't focus on the guilt of his subjects; he doesn't like many of them, and doesn't ask you to, either—he invites you to despise them, even—nor does he shy away from the gruesomeness of their crimes. They're not saints or heroes or victims. Still, he asks, does that mean the state should judge them so definitively—that we should kill them?

Is this a masterwork of emotional suppression, or just emotionless? Alex Karpovsky, best known as a favorite supporting player of popular young indie directors, directs this, his third film, a slow-boil character study that flirts with genre. Is it a psychological thriller? Well, until it finally (finally!) boils over, it's more like an anti-thriller, a workaday portrait of a scientist who drunkenly hooks up once with a coworker and, months later, is still secretly obsessing over her. Karpovsky stars, too, as this psychopath; usually the comically smug and shaggy friend in films by directors like Lena Dunham or Andrew Bujalski (you guys, he's in Girls!), here he casts himself against type—clean cut and bespectacled, unsmiling, his social awkwardness not a quirk but actually a symptom of severe mental illness.

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine

Sleepless Night is a French action movie, which means that it follows the formula set by its American counterparts—there are plenty of speeding cars, shootouts, and injured bodies; there's lots of running, shouting, and punching—but also makes the time to let its hero (Tomer Sisley) stop running, sit down, and weep in an empty stairwell between set pieces. It's his haggard emotional credibility driving the plot—not just director Frédéric Jardin's exciting pacing and twisty storytelling—that makes the movie so effective.

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine

In The Cabin in the Woods, writer-director Drew Goddard and writer-producer Joss Whedon unpack, then dismantle, and finally unbind the horror movie, liberating all its archetypes from the punishing confines (and confining punishments!) of the genre. It's not unlike Funny Games in that it strips the characters of their characterhood, eventually making them instead more like real people battling against imposed archetypes; thus, the filmmakers burden the audience with a greater moral responsibility for the violence done to them. People disdain Michael Haneke for that movie's lecturing; Goddard and Whedon get away with it here because they're careful not to wag their fingers, even though they prove strong critics of genre and viewer. Instead, they laugh a lot—not at horror's clichés but with them, all while remaining aware of their problematic subtexts.

10 April 2012

Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret is based on a true story. The incident that sets the film's story in motion—the distraction of a bus driver about a cowboy hat that ends in an accident—happened to a high-school classmate of the writer-director. She told him the story during a lunch date in the 11th grade, and the whole time all he could think about was how he wanted to sleep with her.

Lonergan tells this story often, as he did during a Q&A following a screening on Saturday night at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, but now it has a new twist: he was telling it again at a recent Q&A when he saw a hand waving from the audience. And there was Jill Breslauer, the girl herself, whom he hadn't seen in 30 years, at the movies with her husband—and wearing a cowboy hat!

Keep reading this dispatch from the Film Society at Lincoln Center at The L Magazine

15 March 2012

This shaggy-dog comedy-turned-melodramatic weepie—about fate, interconnectedness and the desire for meaning—opens with a monologue by the title character in defense of Signs, an apologia for meandering films whose narrative ramblings reflect our own unsteady pas de deux with fate. The plotty Jeff asks us not only to bear with its own tortuous storytelling, but to accommodate and appreciate the twists in our own life stories. Everything happens for a reason, follow your destiny—all that bunk.

13 March 2012

To promote the release of his new book Zona, jack of all genres Geoff Dyer hosted a panel discussion around a DVD-screening of Tarkovsky's Stalker in front of a spillover crowd on Saturday at the New School's Tishman Auditorium. People sat in the aisles, in partial-view alcoves, in folding chairs carried in by a custodian. The book is about—or, roots its digressions in—that 1979 movie, an obsession of Dyer's since he saw it in his twenties, the film he's seen more than any other ("except When Eagles Dare," he said); it's part novelization, part critical history, and part memoir, an idiosyncratic exploration of an idiosyncratic film.

Occupying a space between Jarmusch's lanky hep and Lynch's preternatural nerdiness, Dyer headed an impressive roster of guests: Walter Murch, Dana Stevens, Phillip Lopate, Francine Prose, and Michael Benson. They offered "commentary and banter" throughout the evening, before and after the film and at least three times during, when Dyer pushed pause on the MacBook Pro on stage. (The event was called "Tarkovsky Interruptus," one of several Tarkovsky-related, Dyer-hosted events last weekend). "It's a unique way to see Stalker," Dyer said. "A uniquely irritating way." But perhaps a good way for the half of the audience that had never seen the movie before—those who might resist Tarkovsky's deliberate rhythms. "You're not gonna have a chance to get bored, because of the interruptions," Dyer said. "It does not move at the pace of a James Bond film."

07 March 2012

This latest addition to the Greek New Wave is about the future—specifically, Greece's unpreparedness for it. News reports have detailed that country's economic troubles, but this film explores some of their underlying causes, digging into cultural generalizations in a way journalism can't. Ariane Labed starts as Bella, an awkward twentysomething maladjusting to society as her father dies from an unspecified ailment. She is sexually inexperienced—the first scene features some of the least erotic making out in movie history, as she attempts to learn kissing from her best and only friend, played by Evangelia Randou—but she's also generally socially ignorant. Writer-director Athina Rachel Tsangari codes her as a child: she skips arm-in-arm with her biffle; they spit out of windows onto the street below and imitate wild beasts. (Bella and her father enjoy David Attenborough nature specials; the film takes its name from a Greek mispronunciation of his name, a twisting of the naturalist as Bella is a twisted bit of nature.)

29 February 2012

Director Andrew Bowler and producer Gigi Causey, who lived in Brooklyn a while before decamping to Los Angeles last year, were nominated for an Oscar this year for their short film, Time Freak, a time-travel comedy. I spoke to both by email about Brooklyn, their film, and the sometimes surreal nomination experience.

Will you write a speech?
They have a lunch for the nominees very early in the process and while they have everyone together—and it is everyone—they encourage us (strongly) to prepare something and commit it to memory. Then they show you a video by Tom Hanks on how to give a good Oscar speech and he, too, asks you to please be prepared. So, since it's hard to say no to Tom Hanks, we have prepared something. You only have 45 seconds before they play you off so it will be brief for sure. If we are lucky enough to be up there, we plan on mentioning the countless people who have helped and supported us in the collective 30+ years that Gigi and I have been working at this.

If Yorgos Lanthimos's previous feature, Dogtooth, examined the tyranny of the motion-picture director, then his follow-up, Alps, explores the lives of actors. The focus is off of instruction-givers: here, those who issue orders usually have their heads chopped out of the frame, or are out of focus, or have their backs to the camera; this is a movie about interchangeability, replaceability, the loss of self. It centers on a group that gets paid to fill in for the recently deceased, playing the dead to help the loved ones they left behind ease through their grief.

So, literally, they're actors, and the film addresses specifically the profession's unique condition: the weird exploitation, the objectification, the sexualization, the coddling—and the potential addiction to assuming another's life. But it's also more broadly about identity...

Let an actress pass diarrhea into a restroom sink and a thousand critics can write think pieces about gender and the Apatow formula. But for me Bridesmaids had a lot less to do with sisterhood than it did the economy. Goddamn, this movie is one long class-anxiety nightmare, a relentless shaming—sexually, professionally, every which way—of Kristen Wiig's Annie, who has to ride coach while others ride first class, who has to fret over price tags, who drives a shit car, who doesn't have the resources to shower her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) with the kind of gifts and parties that a rival lady-friend can. I thought Annie's problem wasn't that she had to watch Lillian get married—the formula for so many friends-growing-apart narratives—but that she had to watch as her old pal moved past her economically. The saddest part is the way Annie's economic life becomes linked with her personal life: her bakery goes under, she loses her boyfriend; being broke makes her insecure and inspires a self-loathing that pushes her to sleep with awful men. If it weren't for all the jokes, Bridesmaids would have really bummed me out.

[The main character] embodied the caricature of the new, post-Giuliani New Yorker, the self-centered resident who considers the city his personal plaything. The movie is a lot of fun as a contemporary travelogue (hey, it's our beloved Sunny's! And the intersection of Front and Pearl streets!), as the movie's junior detective story—imbued with phony gravitas via terrorism—takes Oskar from Queens to Brooklyn, exploring the city's diversity to discover that most New Yorkers are fundamentally sympathetic and kind (as long as they don't live in Rockaway). But the city also comes across as a baby-proofed wonderland, in which an unaccompanied minor's greatest concern when gabbing with a group of homeless people in Central Park, or walking over the Manhattan Bridge to Fort Greene, or climbing into a car with a strange adult, is whether he can muster the courage to overcome his social anxieties. I guess he has bigger things to worry about, like strangers flying planes into buildings?

21 February 2012

Ben Wheatley's cryptic, loose, gory, and discombobulating sophomore feature is part kitchen-sink drama, part hit-man buddy picture, and part pagan death-cult horror movie—as though the fellas from In Bruges wandered into a version of Wicker Man directed by Mike Leigh. It revolves around Jay (Neil Maskell), an out-of-work and rageoholic assassin-qua-family man, with a Danny Torrance-looking son and an embittered marriage. For half an hour, the trio's domestic dramas play out, but unsettling jump cuts and Jim Williams's unnerving Penderecki-esque score suggest something amiss beyond family strife. Then Jay gets a new job.

Not unlike Jacob's Ladder, the movie concerns former soldiers—in this case, UK Iraq War vets—inhabiting an increasingly surreal world of nocturnal visions and peculiar encounters.

Moneyball is a story about baseball, which means it's a story about America, right? It's a redemption story, but more to the point an American Dream story, a practically Capraesque affirmation of America, though perhaps a bit more complex; Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) has the financial disadvantage as the general manager of the Oakland A's—they're the runts of capitalism, with one-third of the payroll of the Yankees—but he chips away at their hegemony through his determination and intelligence; or, at least, the smarts to employ and listen to people smarter than him (Jonah Hill). Strangely, Beane struck me as a Mitt Romney figure; his solution to solving baseball's "medieval thinking" sounded awfully Bain Capital-esque, making systems more efficient by breaking hoary shibboleths about prizing people over statistics. Moneyball sort of celebrates a profits (i.e. wins)-over-people approach. Although Beane also succeeds only when he becomes less like Romney (in affect if not ideology)—when he drops the cold and distant thing and connects with his players.

There's a pretty plain moral simplicity here: Lisbeth becomes this absurd repository for all that's awful and abusive about how men treat women, the barbarity of this misogyny highlighted by the red-herring connection of the case she's investigating to Scandinavian Nazis. And if there's one thing the Academy loves, it's movies about the WWII-era Jewish experience, yeah? I think what's most damaging to this movie's Oscar chances is that it's lowbrow and artless, a pulpy streamlining of Steig Larsson's knotty, already artless plotting—efficient perhaps, but Oscarbait's gotta be more than summer fare with a prestige-season gloss; it's gotta make at least pretenses toward significance! And probably feature fewer car chases, eh?

All black women are wonderful and all white women are terrible—except for those who went to college, that is! If I were a woman, I would have left the theater feeling so much better about myself, whether black or white. (Not as a man, though. The movie's tangential males are either horny, boorish, violent, casually misogynistic, casually racist, and/or uxorious lily-livers.) For any black women in the audience, they can identify, or at least sympathize, with the film's wise, quasi-magical black women: so put upon by society, but so strong, so courageous! For the whites, they can take comfort in the fact that the white people (like them!) aren't at all so, so, so racist and mean anymore. Good for you, white people! Well, except, aren't some women still treated similarly to the way those in The Help are? I mean, ok, state surgeon generals don't force Caribbean nannies to use separate bathrooms. But only a quarter of Park Slope nannies get paid overtime, for example, even though that's the very first right in New York state's recently adopted Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. What I mean is that I wish director Tate Taylor had acknowledged that there's still plenty of hired help all over America, and that though they're not treated monstrously, they can be treated less than ideally. Instead, he depicts it all as problems of the past since rectified. I also wish he hadn't portrayed black women as good because they're good mothers, and white women as bad because they're bad mothers. (Though he allows that unmarried women could go to college and become writers, so they can tell the stories of mothers.)

The heroes in Xavier Gens's The Divide don't simply stumble into some prefab horror-movie depravity. The French splattermeister doesn't take the conditions of a torture porn for granted: rather, his characters slowly fashion them—all it takes is nine normal New York neighbors locked in the superintendent's fallout shelter following a nuclear attack for a matter of weeks before shaved-hairless men are living beside the bound and battered corpse of their former sex slave, trying to rape the rest of the male and female survivors. The question is whether Gens's brutality and gore have a purpose. His breakthrough, 2007's Frontier(s), was so blatantly political that its politics were inconsequential, receding behind a pointless exercise in envelope-pushing degeneracy. But I don't think The Divide is so nihilistic, perhaps because the director is working from a script he didn't write.

10 January 2012

One of the many, many things that irked me about this movie was that, despite some shallow trappings, it wasn't about Hawaii at all—it was merely set there; the archipelago's greatest functions were to provide an ironic counterpoint to the narrative's tribulations, and as weather for a comedy of casual dress. (Oh, and to allow Clooney to explain how "archipelago" is a metaphor for his family!) I got the sense that Hemmings' novel likely drew a sharp allegorical connection between Clooney's wife's death-state and Hawaiian history, but the screenwriters can hardly be bothered to establish it, despite that opening monologue and the retained title. Hey, maybe if there's a late-act speech or something it'll all become clear? But this failure just highlights a larger problem: the movie's lazy loyalty to its source material. Every year has such shit adaptations—last year, it was Never Let Me Go; the year before that, The Lovely Bones and The Time Traveler's Wife—that, in a misguided attempt to honor the original prose (usually through voice-over), spend too much time telling what should be shown, expend too much effort underlining what should be left implied—or, conversely, skipping over essential information in order to hit plot points. If Payne esteems Hemmings' book, he should have just reread it; this movie does nothing but demean it. (Unless it's bad, in which case he simply does it no favors.) The movie ends up structured as a series of meaningful conversations piled on top of each other—airings of grievances, comings to terms—that highlight the personal at the expense of any enriching, grander historical meaning, and give a lot of supporting actors (Robert Forster, Judy Greer) a chance to mug for Oscars...

The connection I made to J. Edgar was that both movies are about a mean and miserable old person looking to justify their poor choices—to vindicate themselves in the sure-to-be-unkind eyes of history. But those might just be my own anti-Thatcher biases at work. The movie actually seems pretty sympathetic to Lady Ironsides, which I would imagine has something to do with the unusual number of women involved in its production: director, writer, and superstar, ladies all. This is a movie about the experience of being a Western woman in the 20th century, trying to achieve more than your mother would have been allowed to, confronting and overcoming society's pervasive boy's club mentality. And the filmmakers kind of love Thatcher for everything she accomplished, as evidenced by her epic exit walk when she steps down as prime minister—in slow motion, to some Romantic aria, across a floor strewn with rose petals. Or how she totally doesn't die while washing that tea cup. The Iron Lady is more interested in the effects of her ambition on her family, a look at the loneliness that accompanies power—that sort of thing—than in the social effects of her policies, which are vaguely summed up by video images of people protesting...